How to Take Inventory for Your Small Business: 7 Tips to Kickstart Your Strategy

Start your free trial, then enjoy 3 months of Shopify for $1/month when you sign up for a monthly Basic or Starter plan. Once you understand why keeping up with inventory is so important, how do you do it? It might seem like a lot of guesswork to know what the market will call for and how to deliver — and market research can only take you so far. Retail shrinkage actually caused $46.8 billion in loss of money for U.S retailers in 2017. This is a huge threat to your profit margins and includes theft by employees or shoplifters, and supplier error or damages.

• There are four main categories of inventory shrinkage due to loss and theft.
• Some of its advanced features include demand planning, cycle counts, and very detailed product catalogs.
• Lastly, you’ll need to contact support to execute integrations via API, even if you’re on the ultra plan.
• Once you’ve enabled inventory, you will receive alerts in your Dashboard for low-stock or sold-out items, so you’ll know when to reorder and restock.
• As a small business, dropshipping is a great way to make a quick buck and save on space.
• Good inventory management will also ensure that you don’t overstock products that you won’t be able to sell.

It is customizable to different business types, offering an intuitive interface. Zoho also provides features for managing perishable items, like alerts and expiration monitoring. Inventory management is important to execute properly so you can fulfill clients’ orders correctly and in a timely manner.

Barcode Generation and Scanning

However, the cheaper plan for businesses with fewer than 1500 orders per month is much more limited. Its super intuitive functionality allows your team to learn how to track important details about your items quickly. Sortly has most of the basic inventory management software features like warehouse management, inventory management https://kelleysbookkeeping.com/how-much-do-bookkeeping-services-for-small/ control, barcode scanning abilities, and basic inventory reports. Square’s free cloud-based inventory management software gives you the tools to enable and track inventory by item or in bulk. For items with inventory enabled, the stock count updates based on sales from the Square app, Square Invoices, and your online store.

Plus, this frees you up to focus on tasks to grow your business, like interpreting your reports and making better decisions based on your findings. There are few things more critical to the success of your small business than a robust and well-rounded inventory management process. The trouble is, if you’ve never had to manage inventory before, it’s tough to know where to 10 Companies That Hire for Remote Bookkeeping Jobs start. MOQ focuses on maintaining the minimum possible amount of each product type a seller is willing to fulfill. High-ticket items tend to have a lower MOQ, while low-cost items often have a higher MOQ. It is important to take this into account when reordering products from suppliers; consider a supplier’s MOQ for a particular product against your own sales projections.

Best for Retail: Lightspeed for Retail

Many small businesses prioritize their more expensive products using this approach as these are likely in higher demand and cost the business the most money. Only you can determine whether an inventory management solution is a worthwhile investment. Consider whether the software can help you save time and energy, reduce errors, increase sales, provide better customer service and ultimately help you grow your business. Issues related to inventory management are neither new nor born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the pandemic has shown what can happen when inventory planning, management, and tracking are not well-thought-out. The traditional unit-based policies for safety stock are outdated and too static to address the sudden disruption in supply and demand that we witnessed over the last year.